She ran through the hall, past the great window, without a
shirt on, and wondered if he were in the field behind the house. A strange
thought to coincide with the fleeing, for she was a deeply innocent type of
girl.
The house was preparing itself for winter, and you could
feel the grey, the color and texture of an old wasp’s nest, as it wrapped
itself around it and settled in the cracks of the wood. The sweaters had been
brought up from the basement, where the floor was freezing. The girl, maybe
we’ll call her Charlotte or Nellie, stood on her rug in the middle of that
floor and pretended that the snow, and first, the cold wasn’t coming. If she
didn’t step out into the concrete, it wasn’t.
She was smaller these days, and colder more easily. Winter
was frightening.
She ran through the hall of the graying house now, for one
of the sweaters brought up from the basement, to be a little warmer. And the
thought of the boy could not be accounted for. It was ridiculous, and maybe, if
we ignore it, it will hang its head in shame and go away? She brought the
sweater over her shoulders and it rested on her hip bones. Nobody, especially
not the boy, saw her flight past the great window. The halls of that heathered house are haunted. In a good way. The beetles will tell you so. She watches them, and takes care of them, and sometimes, they get stepped on, or their wings get pulled off the by the children that live there, and sometimes, when she tires of one, she’ll pin it up on the wall, and pretend that it never existed alive.
She pins up the beetle in the field the most.
There’s a labyrinth in the garden, and she wanders it. It’s not a proper maze; It’s quite easy to navigate if you know the way, and if you don’t, it’s quite easy to learn. She will wander for hours sometimes, even in the rain. Especially in the rain. She thinks about herself a lot while she wanders. She tries to fix that. The beetles swirl around her head, none of them quite palpable, and she can’t decide which one to watch.
Today, when she finds the end of the maze, in her sweater, she sees, that strangely, the sun has arrived, if only for a little while, and the world is a peach again. She steps to the edge of the field and the last of the sunlight beats her hair into gold. All of the beetles have gone to the house, by now, but one, and she stands with it, hovering at her ear, for a very long time. The world is a peach, and the field is only fuzz. She sees the boy out there in it, and wonders if he can ever see her.
